Teenage Estrogen...

I am a father. I have a teenage daughter. There are times I find myself doing things and being in places I never would have imagined that I would be. But as a father, with a daughter, I do those things a father must do. And at times I find myself at places that I would not have been of my own volition, except to support my teenage daughter as her father.

Why am I establishing such a baseline of thought in this post? Well, because I took my daughter and a couple of friends to the mall this past weekend. I spent the afternoon with 3 young teenage girls giggling and chattering in a foreign tongue. Well, it might as well have been foreign. I couldn't understand most of it.

But you know, thinking back on it, I now know they didn't really use words most of the time, or at least not real words. They would make noises and hand gestures and all three would burst into giggles. I started imagining it like a nature documentary:

Jim followed the pack of females in their natural habitat and studied their primitive communication abilities. There is no clear leader in the pack and at times will demonstrate random flocking behavior. Once they have eyed their prey, they all go on alert and their posture changes. Watching them, I feel somewhat sorry for the store clerks that they are about to pounce on. But we must remind ourselves that this is just the food chain out here in the wild malls of the American wasteland.

Well, anyway the shopping excursion was at least entertaining from the standpoint of watching the girls just be girls and do girl things. I just kind of remained in the shadows, trying not to embarrass them and producing my wallet when called on.

But after the mall, I found myself at the movie theater. And what did we see? Batman Begins just opened. Did we see that? No. Star Wars is still playing. Did we see that? No. I saw the teenage girl movie of the summer: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.

Yes I watched it. And I have to admit, I actually liked it. Now there is plenty that as a man I found too laden with estrogen to really get. But as a father, I watched it from a different perspective. The perspective of teenage girls trying to overcome emotional pain and just trying to grow up in sometimes difficult circumstances. There are some positives to that movie. And there are some negatives. But since I am about seeing the positives more often lately, I will stick with those.

Fathers, take your daughters shopping. Take them to the movies. Be involved. Listen to them. And maybe they will never have to make a movie about their messed up teen years :-)